Big Tech Weekly -- A New Initiative

Big tech is crucially important in our everyday lives. Whether you get your groceries from Amazon or Instacart, find information through Google, have an Apple iPhone or other Apple products, or use Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. But these companies also have a lot of power. Amazon knows what you buy so they can show you more items you would like to purchase making them a lot more money. Google controls all search results for what to show you when you google certain things, for example, if you Googled something political, Google decides what comes up, possibly interfering with your views on politics and other issues. Apple can use its products against other Big Tech companies, this includes banning certain apps, and messing with the software of other apps and websites. Another example of Big Tech power is YouTube. YouTube can, through the videos you watch, automatically decide what other videos you will like. YouTube (and pretty much all other big tech companies) uses their information about you to maximize your time on the site as long as possible, affecting your behavior involving YouTube and the internet. Say if you just want to watch one video, YouTube can influence you to end up watching many more videos than just one. Twitter can actually have a direct effect on politics. President Donald Trump’s tweets and other controversial tweets can easily be deleted by Facebook. Facebook also determines what ads you will appreciate and click on to show you. But the scariest thing is that Facebook actually monitors all discussions, confessions, and more on it. Facebook uses that information to find out when and who will say what before they even know that they are going to say it. This leads to a very confusing field of predicting the future through Facebook. This only works because approximately 2.7 billion people are on Facebook. That means that about one of every 5 people on our earth is on Facebook. The number gets even crazier when you look at other big tech companies. Every month more than 197 million people order something on amazon. Some think that Amazon actually uses its Echo product, Alexa to spy on you. Amazon also sells more than 12 million products. 1.8 billion people use Google’s email product, Gmail. 1.8 billion people that Google can potentially spy on. More than 800 million people around the globe (information from May 2017) use Google Drive for storage, documents, files, and more. About a billion people use Apple products (information from May 2019).

All 4 big tech companies can negatively impact our world, which is why we are creating a new initiative called Big Tech Weekly. It will publish weekly on Fridays starting this Friday, October 23.

Thanks,

Cooper Baehr

Editor, Big Tech Weekly

Head of Marketing